Hello, and welcome back to Shouts and Murmurs, a weekly round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more from The Crush Bar, written by Fergus Morgan.
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This week, though, partly because its late, partly because I have written loads, and partly because this will be the last issue of Shouts and Murmurs until September, as The Crush Bar is going on a two-week pre-Fringe hiatus from Friday and will be focused on the festival when it returns in mid-July, I have removed the paywall, so everyone can read all of it. It’d still be nice if you chucked me a few quid, though.
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Last week in The Crush Bar:
Sorry this newsletter is a day late, again. Blame Paraguay and their sensational victory over Germany in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
It wasn’t just a good woche for fans of fußball-related schadenfreude, though. Nein. It was also an decent few days for supporters of big-money shenanigans and the erosion of British theatre’s soul at the hands of omnivorous corporate capitalism, with American billionaire Ari Emanuel’s Qatar-backed Mari Group reportedly in “advanced talks” to follow up their acquisition of ticketing outfit TodayTix by forking out £4.5 billion for ATG Entertainment. Some say that a guy that just sat next to Trump at that UFC stain on America’s history last month having free reign to further optimise ATG’s exploitative policy of piggybacking on artists and audiences with dynamic pricing, booking fees, pricy add-ons and expensive drinks at dozens of Britain’s historic theatres is actually bad. Others say this goal should have stood.
In other less-worrying-but-still-quite-concerning news involving large numbers, Trafalgar Entertainment has acquired Nicks Hytner and Starr’s London Theatre Company, and with it both the highly-flexible Bridge Theatre and vague immersive space Lightroom. It is, Hytner said, presumably with a faraway look in his eyes, “the right time to be moving on.” Why less worrying? Well, because Trafalgar Entertainment’s Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire are at least good old-fashioned British theatre multi-millionaire entrepreneurs with a more responsible approach to operating venues than that of the global corporation they founded then were unceremoniously ousted from. Why still quite concerning? Because Hytner and Starr have built something quite remarkable over the last nine years: a successful commercial theatre with an adventurous artistic soul, which has birthed such belting hits as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Into The Woods, such noble failures as Allelujah and Young Marx, and such complete trash as A Very Very Very Dark Matter. And now, much like they did at the National Theatre thirteen years ago, questions swirl over the Bridge Theatre’s future post-Nicks. Will it still be a producing house? Will it have an artistic director? And, most importantly, will they still do those tasty madeleines?
It was also, genuinely, a big week for fans of superhero David Byrne (not that one) and his ongoing crusade to save theatre, too. Not only has he recently renewed the Royal Court’s champion supporter-ship of The Crush Bar, thus doing his bit to sustain my career insightful and independent theatre journalism, he has also found time to somehow double production payments for directors and designers at his venue: a director working on a show in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs will get £18,250 in 2027, as opposed to £9000 in 2025, while designers will see fees jump from £7,850 to £15,000. Not only that, but Byrne also found time to jump on a Zoom call with Edinburgh-Fringe-headed Circus Zambia and me to explain how the two companies are working to support their similarly-named shows about Edward Makuka Nkoloso’s Zambian Space Program. “We’re using what could be a difficult coincidence to really amplify both shows,” trumpeted Byrne. “And with great power comes great responsibility.”
In further welcome news for theatre’s freelancers, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh and other rich men have joined Arts Council England in throwing some cash towards Freelancers Make Theatre Work, which will sustain the organisation and its ambitions for the next three years. On top of ACE hiring Yasmin Khan in a role dedicated to supporting freelancers and culture secretary for now Lisa Nandy announcing that she will finally appoint a freelance champion for the creative industries, Lyn Gardner ponders whether the industry has finally learned the lessons it said it would learn six years ago in The Stage. “Undoubtedly, there is still a very long way to go for the industry to have a more equitable and rewarding relationship with the freelancers who make the work and ensure it happens on our stages every night,” Gardner heavily caveats, “but there are welcome signs of movement.”
It was also a good week for fans of iconoclastic directors doing Shakespeare, with Joe Hill-Gibbins and Jazz Woodcock-Stewart set to stage Julius Caesar and the rarely-seen King John respectively in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse this winter, and James Norton set to give his Dane in German auteur Thomas Ostermeier’s globe-trotting take on Hamlet in the West End next year. “My first Hamlet has been touring the world for 18 years so I am honoured to have the opportunity to bring it here to London with James, who in my mind is a perfect Prince of Denmark,” boasted Ostermeier, who did that riotously good reworking of The Seagull last spring.
Finally up here: it was a great week for me, until it wasn’t. On Thursday night, it reached a glorious peak when my podcast A History Of Scottish Drama In Six Plays was highly commended - yes, highly commended - at the inaugural Scottish Podcast Awards: I got a little piece of paper proving as much, which I may well frame and display alongside my Best Attitude (read: Biggest Dweeb) trophy from a football camp I did when I was eight. Many thanks to the person who became a paid supporter of the newsletter so that I could afford an eye-catchingly expensive ticket to the ceremony. Alas. everything came crashing down on Sunday, though, when I accidentally put petrol in the AdBlue tank of my car and had to pay £520 to have it siphoned out. Ah well, as old Bill Shakespeare had it, “the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” If only there was a way you could help me recoup that money while also supporting the future of an important journalistic endeavour…
Show news: Jesus Christ Superstar is touring with Eurovision’s Sam Ryder; new musical Wild About You will run at Charing Cross Theatre; another new musical about Manchester in the 1990s featuring music from Radiohead, The Smiths and more will tour; there are some new Billy Elliots; Ugly Bucket’s Stuffed and a new show from piss / Carnation will run at the New Diorama; Spirited Away is doing a world tour; a new Timberlake Wertenbaker play about climate change, The Animals Come To The Table, will also run in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse this winter; there will be a stage version of Victoria Wood’s dinnerladies; new plays by Sami Ibrahim and Inua Ellams will run at Bristol Old Vic; Mel Giedroyc, Christopher Eccleston and more will do White Rabbit Red Rabbit; a gender-flipped Othello and a new Stewart Pringle play will run are in the RSC’s new season; Punchdrunk is doing a project at a luxury resort in the UAE, which doesn’t seem very rainbow rhythms, does it?
Other news: LWTheatres’ Darren Atkins has been appointed president of SOLT; new production company Act Two Entertainment are working with Matthew Dunster, Marisha Wallace and more on… stuff; you can buy art by actors for the fourth and final time at the MAMA exhibition in Brixton; Samantha Lane is leaving Little Angel Theatre; Colchester’s Mercury Theatre has launched an award for Essex-based playwrights; ACE has released details of its “clearer” application process for NPO funding; Callum Smith will jump ship from the Edinburgh Lyceum to Glasgow Citz; they had to do hydration breaks in the West End last week; the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre has been rechristened, not to the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor Theatre, but in honour of the late, great Tom Stoppard.
The week in reviews: Pride, The Misanthrope, Sinatra The Musical, The Truth, and more…
Right, it was a big week, I wrote a lot up there, and Norway vs Senegal is about to kick off, so we are going to do this quickly. Let’s start at the National Theatre, in the Dorfman auditorium, where everyone apart from The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish loved Matthew Warchus and Stephen Beresford’s stage adaptation of Pride, their own 2014 movie about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and the remarkable relationship the campaign group forged with the small village of Onllwyn in Wales in 1984: it’s a joyous show about an inspirational story of solidarity, featuring a fabulous performance from History Boy Samuel Barnett. It gets five stars from Tom Wicker in Time Out, Arifa Akbar in The Guardian, and Sarah Hemming in The Financial Times. In the Lyttelton Theatre, though, The Misanthrope misfires: Martin Crimp’s third crack at a modern-day adaptation of Moliere’s classic comedy takes aim at myriad contemporary issues but doesn’t really have anything insightful to say about any of them. InRu directs well and Robert Jones’ design has an eye-opening trick up its sleeve, but star Sandra Oh struggles in the central, gender-swapped role of Alice. It gets two stars from The Times’ Clive Davis and three from almost everyone else.
“This time around Crimp has moved the action from 1666, the time of Louis XIV, to the modern day, the time of cancel culture and intimacy coordinators. As a plot device, it opens up a cornucopia of topics for Alice to mock and rail against – but it all proves too delicious to pass up for Crimp, who, like a kid in a candy store, can’t decide and so takes one of everything. The result is a broad satire filled with platitudes and generalised debates about female empowerment, the patriarchy and trolls on the internet. Crimp aims his satire like a fine spritz rather than the firehose jet of Molière’s original.”
In the West End, another entertainment legend gets his legacy whitewashed via jukebox musical in Sinatra The Musical. Written by Joe DiPietro and directed by Kathleen Marshall, the show tracks Ol’ Blue Eyes’ life from the height of his early fame, through the nadir of the late 1940s and early 1950s, to his Oscar-winning comeback in 1953 film From Here To Eternity, but the more interesting elements of Sinatra’s story - the Mafia connections, the serial infidelity, the Civil Rights activism - are either overlooked or underexplored in favour of a hagiographic spin through the admittedly wonderful hits. The critics aren’t sure Joel Harper-Jackson has the requisite charisma to carry it all, either, and it gets a mix of two-star and three-star reviews. Also in the West End: Lindsay Posner’s star-studded revival of French writer Florian Zeller’s infidelity-themed farce The Truth, which first kicked off Zeller-fever at the Menier Chocolate Factory back in 2016, is either “seat-shakingly funny” if you believe Mark Lawson’s five-star write-up in The Guardian, or “neither funny nor incisive enough to really grip” if you prefer Dave Fargnoli’s two-star review in The Stage. Other opinions are available, covering all the ratings in between. Also in the West End: Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson’s celebrated RSC staging of Cyrano De Bergerac starring Adrian Lester and Susannah Fielding, which is still wonderful.
“The piece admirably attempts a warts-and-all portrait of the legendary singer, focusing on a rocky period early in his career, the toll his ambition took on his family and his serial infidelities. There are some meaty questions here about the strains of a showbiz career on relationships, the changing musical landscape, the brutal, segregated and chauvinist society of the 1940s and ’50s, and the egregious control wielded by record and film companies over an artist’s life… the trouble is that the format doesn’t allow for in-depth exploration of these issues, resulting in a somewhat superficial account of events — curiously anodyne too, given the extraordinary details of Sinatra’s life.”
Elsewhere in London: new plays! Tia-Renne Mullings’ adolescent dating drama A To B at Soho Theatre is entertaining but underpowered, according to Anya Ryan in The Guardian; Ben Ockrent’s black comedy about bickering bereaved siblings Relics at the Lyric Hammersmith is “wince-makingly funny,” according to WhatsOnStage’s Alun Hood; Sophie Swithinbank’s exhilaratingly unconventional three-hander Sting at the Young Vic is a “masterful, destabilising examination of domestic abuse” according to Tim Bano in Time Out; Rajiv Joseph’s Beckettian riff on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand Archduke at the Royal Court is another “illuminatingly oblique” take on historic events that “addresses urgent current concerns,” according to The Guardian’s Mark Lawson; and Richard Nelson’s Tucci-free Springwood at the Hampstead Theatre is a “quietly magnificent, richly humane” portrait of the 1939 meeting between King George VI and FDR, according to The Times’ Dominic Maxwell. I reiterate my plea for someone to stage Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama on this side of the Atlantic.
Elsewhere, in Regent’s Park, Atri Bannerjee’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is imaginative but incoherent, according to The Telegraph’s Claire Allfree. In Yorkshire, Amy Leach directs an evocative adaptation of much-loved movie Brassed Off in Leeds Playhouse’s cavernous Quarry Theatre, according to The Guardian’s Nick Ahad. And, finally, in Glasgow, Bard In The Botanics opens its summer season with a lean, lucid five-man Othello adapted and directed by Gordon Barr, according to me. And that’s all for this week, and, indeed, until September, when regular issues resume post-Fringe.
Look out for: Jesus Christ Superstar and Trainspotting in the West End, Cleansed at the Almeida, The Oresteia at the Bridge Theatre, The Guilty at the Donmar, Lear, I Can Die Too and A History Of Paper at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, The Market Deeping Model Railway Club in Nottingham, My Fair Lady in Chichester, The Cherry Orchard and Game Of Thrones in Stratford, Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe, I’m Every Woman in Wembley, Cats in Regent’s Park, Death Note at the Barbican, and lots more.
The week in interviews: Stephen Mangan, Rosie Sheehy, Tanya Reynolds, and more…
“When the camera and the audience got a bit closer, my face got funnier. So that sort of set the die, really.” Actor Stephen Mangan chats to The Times’ Alice Jones about his new West End role in The Truth, his thoughts on audience behaviour and ticket prices, his transition into comedy, the death of his mother, and more.
“People always ask me, ‘When are you going to be in a comedy?’” Welsh star Rosie Sheehy stunned in the difficult dramas Guess How Much I Love You?, The Brightening Air and Machinal. Now, she is doing another laugh-a-minute show in Simon Stone’s The Oresteia at the Bridge. She speaks to The FT’s Sarah Hemming.
“I’d love to do a Shakespeare comedy. I’d love a crack at Viola in Twelfth Night.” Actor Tanya Reynolds is currently starring in the West End’s hottest ticket, Ava Pickett’s 1536. I spoke to her for my Stage Directions interview in The Stage. Also, I chatted to singer Natalya Romaniw for the same slot in the opera special.
“Finances are always at the mercy of the weather; but there is something quite Shakespearean about that” As his Glasgow company celebrates its 25th birthday, Bard In The Botanics artistic director Gordon Barr chats to The Scotsman’s Joyce McMillan about staging a quarter-century of Shakespeares in Scotland.
“As the years have gone by and more and more people have started to make work that’s similar, I’ve started to move further away from it.” Artistic director of immersive pioneers Punchdrunk Felix Barrett is returning to regular theatre with The Guilty at the Donmar Warehouse. He converses with The Observer’s Olivia Ovenden.
Further reading: remembering Penelope Keith, Andy Burnham’s cultural legacy in Manchester, the use of gen-AI in designs, and more…
“What we treasured was her ability to make us laugh and to suggest that under the starched conventionality of upper-class English womanhood lurked impishness, mischief and a desire for adventure.” We lost Penelope Keith, aged 86, this week. There are plenty of obituaries. Here’s The Times. Here’s The Telegraph. Here’s The Guardian. And here, in the same paper, is Michael Billington remembering her: she performed in the first play he ever reviewed for The Guardian, apparently.
"If Aviva Studios attracted millions of new converts to the arts, you could argue that £242 million was money well spent. But does it?” With Andy Burnham set to move into Number 10 as our new PM imminently, The Times’ chief culture writer Richard Morrison surveys the cultural legacy of his tenure as mayor of Manchester.
“I have never forgotten the look of haunted sorrow on the face of Dorothy Tutin’s Varya as she knelt downstage packing a trunk, awaiting the marriage proposal from George Murcell’s Lopakhin that never came.” More Billington in The Guardian: ahead of two productions of The Cherry Orchard, one in Stratford, one in the West End, he does that thing where he roams over his memories of seeing the play over the years.
“Without wanting to seem naive, you do have to hope that where theatre might be able to do its bit in these hate-filled times is through the stories it tells and the plays it programmes.” The backlash to the backlash has begun over that UK Theatre “toolkit” instructing venues on how to engage with Reform. Here is Claire Allfree toeing The Telegraph line. Here, better, is Matt Hemley in The Stage. Here, best, is that Stewart Lee bit in The Nerve I shared last week again…
“What kind of theatre do these twats think Reform want them to make? A version of John Ford’s 1626 classic ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but rewritten to reflect the views of Reform’s Robert Kenyon, who believes women have abortions “so they can shag anyone they want”? …or maybe a version of Larry Kramer’s Aids-crisis epic The Normal Heart, but with the script replaced by endless repetition of the joke about throwing fags into Michael Barrymore’s swimming pool that Nigel Farage told in a speech at his brother’s wedding?”
“Especially noticeable was the final curtain, which drops as the finale number begins and displays an AI image” Here is Theatre & Tonic’s Emmie Newitt on a worrying trend of productions using gen-AI in their designs and marketing material, following reports that Something Rotten! in Manchester does exactly that. Apparently, The Greatest Showman, Thespian and 13 Going On 30 have been similarly accused…
That’s all for this issue. Thanks for reading and for supporting The Crush Bar.
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Fergus